Fidel Castro is dead at the age of 90. The brutal communist dictator established a repressive police state in Cuba, failing to honor his promise of free elections for a democratic nation. He executed thousands of Cubans who opposed his totalitarian regime and imprisoned tens of thousands, beating and torturing many of them. He divided tens of thousands of families, destroyed the economy and the culture and established a communist regime with no place for human rights and freedoms, becoming a satellite of the Soviet Union. He put the world on the brink of nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

During almost six decades, millions of Cubans have fled the communist island in search of freedom and prosperity because all freedoms were suspended by the tyrant who would lecture the nation via radio and TV saying: “Dentro de la revolución todo, contra de la revolución nada.” (With the revolution, everything, against the revolution, nothing.) He made sure all his opponents were silenced by incarceration and often by torture and death.

Fidel Castro and his communist regime exported and supported terrorism, guerrilla warfare, as well as drug trafficking throughout Latin America and the world.

I’m a living witness that his legacy is one of repression, family separation, suffering, death, and destruction of a once prosperous nation.

Free Cubans all over the world are celebrating the death of a monster who enslaved an entire nation and made the Island of Cuba his private plantation. Donald Trump’s statements about the legacy of Fidel Castro are spot on and historically accurate. I should know, I lived under that repressive regime for more than ten years and experienced firsthand the havoc this brutal dictator has reeked during his more than five decades in power, turning Cuba into a maximum security prison. Trump said, and I agree:

“Fidel Castro’s legacy is one of firing squads, theft, unimaginable suffering, poverty and the denial of fundamental human rights. While Cuba remains a totalitarian island, it is my hope that today marks a move away from the horrors endured for too long, and toward a future in which the wonderful Cuban people finally live in the freedom they so richly deserve.”

The President-elect added, “Though the tragedies, deaths and pain caused by Fidel Castro cannot be erased, our administration will do all it can to ensure the Cuban people can finally begin their journey toward prosperity and liberty.”

Donald Trump has won the 2016 presidential election. The polls were wrong, the mainstream and corrupt media that conspired with the Clinton campaign and tried to destroy Donald Trump, was also wrong. Even many establishment Republicans were wrong. Trump’s victory defied all predictions and is one of the greatest political victories in our two and one half centuries as a nation.

Yes, I voted for Trump, as did tens of millions of Americans, to give him the victory. The American people have spoken clearly and unequivocally. Once again, the democratic process has triumphed and we have decided what we want and also what we don’t want.

This presidential election has been a referendum on many important issues: stagnant economic growth during eight years of a failed Obama presidency, a vote against Obamacare, which was rammed through by a president out of touch with the American people, who lives in an alternate reality where things have been turned upside down and wrong has become right and right is considered wrong. It was also a referendum on the Washington establishment, of which Hillary Clinton has been a part for almost three decades. It was a decisive NO to open borders and illegal immigration. It was a definitive NO to the course towards socialism our nation has been following for decades now, in no small measure due to a left wing mainstream media, most of the professorate in our universities, and eight years of a presidency focused on changing America forever and turning it into one more failed socialist nation in the world. It was a resounding NO to the most corrupt politician running for president in the history of our nation: Hillary Rodham Clinton. It was a decisive YES to lower taxes, a strong military, to real choices in health insurance, and very importantly, a resounding YES to the appointment of Supreme Court justices who will abide by the United States Constitution and not legislate from the bench.

Donald Trump’s victory was an unquestionable YES to life and the right of the unborn child and a resounding NO to the abortionists in this country, who have created a multimillion dollar industry with the aid and support of politicians like Hillary Clinton, with Planned Parenthood being the nation’s largest abortion vendor. Journalist Kristan Hawkins said it well: “Planned Parenthood’s grip of death has been released from the White House. Come January, their influence will be gone.”

The silent majority isn’t silent anymore because Donald Trump has given us a voice. We were mocked by Hollywood (the cream of the “crap”), and dismissed by socialist professors in their ivory towers, whose numbers have reached epidemic proportions in our Colleges and Universities. The “deplorable and irredeemable” Americans have spoken. It’s time to make America great again!

I was born and raised in Cuba, a country that, like all communist countries, had and still has government controlled healthcare. Many today still believe in the myth of the achievements of the Cuban Revolution, including the so called “free” healthcare. When government took over the Healthcare System, everything started to fall apart. Doctors and nurses started to leave the country (there’s very little incentive to study and practice medicine, when a taxi driver makes as much or more than a doctor. As a matter of fact, many doctors became full time or part time taxi drivers, that is why in Cuba we have the best educated taxi drivers in the world!), the quality of healthcare went on a steep downward spiral and for the past three decades Cubans in the island don’t even have access to the most basic over the counter medications, like an aspirin or an antihistamine, except for the ones that relatives and friends send them from America.

When a country has a single-payer system, like Canada, that nation has subscribed to the least effective way to achieve universal health insurance coverage. It’s a myth that Canadians enjoy universal healthcare coverage while receiving the same quality and quantity of medical goods and services as Americans today. Americans spend more on healthcare than Canadians do; however, they get faster access to more and better medical resources. Brett Skinner, in the Journal of the American Enterprise Institute, says: “Healthcare appears to cost less in Canada than in the United States partly because Canadian government health insurance does not cover many advanced medical treatments and technologies that are commonly available to Americans. If Canadians had access to the same quality and quantity of healthcare resources that Americans enjoy, Canada’s government health insurance monopoly would cost much more than it currently does.” Mr. Skinner ads: Our recent study comparing healthcare in the United States and Canada shows that the public-private U.S. system outperforms the Canadian system on almost all the key indicators of available healthcare resources. The United States even performs nearly as well as Canada in terms of providing “effective” health insurance coverage for its population.”

Our healthcare system is flawed, like any other human system, but the Canadian model of socialized medicine is far worse. Emulating an unsuccessful healthcare system is not only foolish but perilous. What we are witnessing today in America is a president and an administration with an agenda they want to push through no matter what the people have to say, even if the majority is against it. Townhall meetings all over America and all the latest polls reveal a general frustration and discontent on the part of the people because of the fact that many politicians (mostly ultra liberal democrats) don´t want to hear and don´t care about what voters have to say about healthcare. What I see today is not debate that involves, as someone told me, “the exchange of honest information grounded in fact, in knowledge, in education, in research, in search of the greater good” on the part of the politicians. I see rude, patronizing and condescending political ideologues looking down and putting down honest voters just because they disagree with them vehemently on this issue.

Socialized healthcare, and for that matter “socialized anything”, is never the right answer to any problem facing a nation, particularly the United States of America. Socialism is an ideology and a pretty destructive one at that. I should know. I not only experienced it first hand for many years, but have also studied the subject thoroughly during the past four decades. And the fact that some form of it may be working in certain small European countries, with populations of only a few millions, doesn’t mean that we should follow suit. Our country is too large (not only in square miles but also in population), too rich, too diverse and too complex for our government to start experimenting with simplistic and failed formulas at this stage of the game. We didn’t become the greatest country on the face of the Earth by emulating failed regimes and implementing destructive ideologies. Government tentacles are already too long and intrusive in our lives in America. Mostly because of that, our economy is not the freest in the world (According to the Index of Economic Freedom of the Heritage Foundation/Wall Street Journal). The formula is simple and it works: the smaller the government and the less control it has the better for the people and for the country as a whole, and the freer we are. We already have too much control and intrusion from the government and it has only been detrimental to the wellbeing of our nation and to personal freedom. For example, if parents who value freedom and parental authority over their offspring, want to find out how free they are to make decisions concerning the education of their children, let them go to the public school and tell the administration that their children will no longer be coming to school. They will soon receive an unpleasant surprise from school authorities, and find out the hard way how deep the tentacles of the U.S. government penetrate into the citizen’s private life, gradually leaving less room for decisions that should be made only by parents, not government bureaucrats. I want the government controlling less, not more of the decisions concerning healthcare in my life. Always keep in mind that government is a terrible servant and a fearful master.

Concerning socialism, Winston Churchill said it best: “Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy, its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery.”

I know people (and I’m sure you do too) who are not “living happily ever after” because of handicaps, accidents, pain, etc. However, they are thankful to be alive. They know how precious life is.

This subject goes to the very meaning of human existence. Why are we here? What is the value of human life? The most troublesome cultural issues of our day- abortion, assisted suicide, euthanasia, genetic engineering- all turn on questions about what it means to be human, about the value of human life and how life should be protected.

However, if a person believes that life arouse from the primordial sea through a chance collision of chemicals, and that over billions of years of chance mutations, this biological accident gave rise to the first humans, then that person will believe that we are little more than grown-up germs. This, logically, leads to the conclusion that a person has no greater significance than a baboon.

It all comes down to the question of where life comes from. It determines what we believe about human identity, what we value, and what we believe is our reason for living. IT DETERMINES WHO LIVES AND WHO DIES.

Christians believe that God created humans beings in his own image. And because human life bears this divine stamp, life is sacred, a gift from the Creator. “Then God said, “Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness; let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth” (Genesis 1:26). He and he alone can set the boundaries of when we live and when we die.

If we believe that we have no more significance than a monkey or a dog, that life has little o no purpose, that this life is all there is and that we will not be accountable to God, then we can come to the conclusion that only the fittest, the pretty, the healthy and the desirable people should live, that we can eliminate the imperfect, the handicapped, the old, the weak and even the ugly. This materialistic and secular worldview is held today by those who believe and promote abortion (infanticide) for any reason, including, of course, the killing of children who will be born with handicaps.

Do we have value because we are healthy, pretty and young, or because we are human beings, the crown of creation and God says that we are infinitely valuable because we bear his image: intellect, free will, eternal soul, etc.? Do we kill a child after an accident has left him handicapped? Of course not! Then why should we kill a child in the womb because he or she is unwanted, inconvenient or we know he or she will have intellectual limitations, physical limitations, or both?

“A myth NARAL (National Association for Repeal of Abortion Laws and later renamed National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League) fed to the public through the media was that legalizing abortion would only mean that the abortions taking place illegally would then be done legally. In fact, of course, abortion is now being used as a primary method of birth control in the U.S. and the annual number of abortions has increased by 1,500 since legalization.” David Kupelian, The Marketing of Evil

Indeed, abortion is a very lucrative business in America today.

According to Kupelian’s book, “Another myth fed to and believed by the public was that there were tens of thousands of women being maimed and killed from illegal abortions prior to legalization of abortion law. Not so. It was only a tiny fraction of what the abortion marketers claimed.”

One abortion movement leader and propagandist said: “We aroused enough sympathy to sell our program of permissive abortion by fabricating the number of illegal abortions done annually in the U.S. The actual figure was approaching 100,000, but the figure we gave to the media repeatedly was 1 million. Repeating the lie often enough convinces the public. The number of women dying from illegal abortions was around 200-250 annually. The figure we constantly fed to the media was 10,000. These false figures took root in the consciousness of Americans, convincing many that we needed to crack the abortion law.” David Kupelian, The Marketing of Evil

Our nation has legalized infanticide and, as Kupelian says in his book, “ through a very well thought out and executed propaganda campaign gets more and more people to believe that killing an infant is considered “every woman’s right”.

I have been asked more than once, even by homosexuals, if homosexuality is the unforgivable sin. What follows is a concise and Biblical answer to that question.

The Bible declares all human beings are sinners (“For all have sinned and come short of the glory of God.” Romans 3:23). Homosexuality is not the unforgivable sin. However, homosexuality is condemned by God in the Bible just as He speaks against adultery, fornication, envy, hypocrisy, gluttony, covetousness, malice, laziness, gossip, and a lot of other destructive behavior. That is precisely what sin is: destructive thinking and behavior, primarily against God, but mostly against ourselves and those around us. To sin is to miss the mark, to cross the line, to violate God´s commandments; it means knowing how to do what is right, and then not doing it. When engineers design and build a train, that train is designed and built to move freely while moving on rails. However, if that train derails, we are all too familiar with the destruction it can cause, not only to property but more importantly to human life. We humans were designed by God to function at our best when we live according to his Word, by his instructions. He is our designer and maker; therefore he knows how we function best and how to get us back “on track” when we derail.

By the way, denying the existence of God may be convenient to some, but does not make Him disappear or make His existence untrue, as denying the law of gravity does not invalidate its effects. Who would jump from the rooftop of a 10 story building after saying emphatically that the law of gravity is a lie and has no effect? Only a fool or a crazy person would do such a thing!

The Bible does speak plenty about homosexuality (Old and New Testaments). Read the more than 800 commandments in the books of Exodus, Leviticus and Deuteronomy, in the Old Testament, where God speaks clearly against sexual relations with people of the same sex (homosexuality and lesbianism) and with animals (bestiality). Read also Genesis chapters 13, 18 and 19, where two cities, Sodom and Gomorrah (from which comes the term “sodomite”, meaning a male who engages in anal copulation with another male) were destroyed because most of its inhabitants practiced homosexuality and did not turn away from their sin. I am sure there were other sins they committed that needed repentance on their part, however this was the one sin that God singled out as the main cause for destroying these two cities. You see, they were so perverted and their minds so twisted that they were calling what is good evil and what is evil good, a lot like what is happening today in America and all over the world.

An Unrepentant Heart towards God: the Only Unforgivable Sin

An unrepentant heart towards God is the only unforgivable sin, because God will not force us to change our minds and our attitude towards Him. Also read the book of Romans in the New Testament (chapter 1, verses 18-32) and also 1 Corinthians 6:9-11. What applied to male homosexual relations also applied to female homosexual relations, called today lesbianism. It is mentioned in the New Testament in Romans 1:26-32:

“For this cause God gave them up unto vile affections: for even their women did change the natural use into that which is against nature: And likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another; men with men working that which is unseemly, and receiving in themselves that recompense of their error which was meet. And even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a reprobate mind, to do those things which are not convenient; Being filled with all unrighteousness, fornication, wickedness, covetousness, maliciousness; full of envy, murder, debate, deceit, malignity; whisperers, Backbiters, haters of God, despiteful, proud, boasters, inventors of evil things, disobedient to parents, Without understanding, covenant breakers, without natural affection, implacable, unmerciful: Who knowing the judgment of God, that they which commit such things are worthy of death, not only do the same, but have pleasure in them that do them.”

Finally, when the hypocritical religious leaders brought to Christ a woman caught in the act of adultery, he told them that he among them who was without sin could cast the first stone. All left but Christ and the woman. “He asked her: Where are those who accused you? Has no man condemned you? The woman replied: No man, Lord. And Jesus told her: Neither do I condemn you. GO AND SIN NO MORE.”

Christ did not judge her, because he loved her as a person, the same way He loves every human being. However, He told her to go and SIN NO MORE. That is the essence of true repentance. Asking God to forgive us and then continuing to do the same thing over and over is not true repentance. True repentance means there is a change of mind and heart that leads to a change of conduct. We all have sinned, but we can find true forgiveness, love, peace of mind and true fulfillment in Him who came to die for our sins, the just for the unjust. Christ said: “Truly, truly I say onto you, he that hears my words and believes in Him that sent me, has everlasting life, and shall not be condemned, but is passed from death onto life” (John 5:24).

“For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord” (Luke 2:11).

The policy of turning Christmas into a secular Holiday Season is another unfortunate example of the assault on Christmas and Christianity, which every year comes in many forms, in the public square and by businesses who “embrace any form of cultural, religious, secular and ethnic diversity”, but are offended by almost any representation of Christianity.

We know all too well that Jesus, Mary and Joseph, the Wise Men, the Angels and the animals, have been replaced by the money making parade and show of reindeer, elves, and Santa Claus. The message of salvation and eternal life through the Son of God, who came down from heaven and became Man, has been lost. There was no room in the inn for Mary, Joseph and the baby Jesus. Today, there is no room in so many hearts for the Savior, but the same people always manage to find room for their cars in the full parking lots of the malls all across the country. The Real Christmas has been replaced by the commercially motivated and meaningless “Holiday Season”.

Many businesses across the nation have taken the politically correct road, eliminating the word Christmas from their stores and instructing employees to say “Happy Holidays” instead of Merry Christmas to customers. They have become one more Christmas stealing Grinch in the politically correct anti-Christian wasteland in our country. It matters very little how diverse our community or any community is in America. The great majority of customers buying at these stores celebrate Christmas, the birth of Jesus Christ. We are celebrating Christmas, not “the season”, as they say. Such expressions as “Season’s Greetings” are empty phrases that have very little to do with the celebration and true meaning of Christmas.

We are a nation founded on Judeo-Christian principles, not on secular humanist teachings, which produced the failed Socialist and Marxist-Leninist totalitarian forms of government. If other groups do not celebrate Christmas or choose to celebrate their own Holidays, that is perfectly fine and we respect that. However, here, in the United States of America, to offend and penalize the majority, in the name of “cultural diversity”, and to eliminate any vestige of Christianity not to offend other groups who, for the most part don’t even mind our Christmas celebration and are not offended by it, is not only absurd but downright unfair to the majority of their customers who are, indeed, multi-cultural, but mostly Christian, at least in name and tradition. That is not the way to bring people together. Political correctness is a hypocritical, anti-Christian and, for the most part, failed secular humanistic way of trying to “bring people together in peace and love”.

There would be no “Holiday” without Christmas. What in the world would we be celebrating without it at this time of the year? May I ask what would be the reason for the Season without Christ? Even in the word Holiday (Holy Day) we can’t get away from the historical fact of the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem, more than 2000 years ago, which was indeed the Holy-Day: “For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord” (Luke 2:11). This is the original Christmas, the Biblical one, the “Real Celebration”, with Christ at the center, with its message of true peace, hope and salvation, offered to all who are willing to receive it.

The true meaning of Christmas is summed up perhaps in the best known and loved verse in the entire Bible, John 3:16: “For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” This is why we exchange gifts on Christmas day, because God the Father gave first, and He did not give us a mere material gift, but His only Son, the very best of Heaven, to provide salvation for all who would believe in Him.